


I'm Nobody! Who are you?

by StHoltzmann



Series: Kink is in the Mind of the Beholder (Kinktober 2018) [1]
Category: Ghostbusters (2016), Ocean's 8 (2018)
Genre: Crossover, F/F, Kinktober 2018, Masks, Sexual Tension, Smart Queer Snappy Dressers, kink is all in the mind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-23 18:07:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16164128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StHoltzmann/pseuds/StHoltzmann
Summary: Do you put on a mask to hide your identity, or to lose it?A vignette of an encounter between two very intelligent and decidedly eccentric snappy dressers. (Although this is for Kinktober, this installment has nothing explicit.)





	I'm Nobody! Who are you?

**Author's Note:**

> I’m Nobody! Who are you?  
> Are you – Nobody – too?  
> Then there’s a pair of us!  
> Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
> 
> How dreary – to be – Somebody!  
> How public – like a Frog –  
> To tell one’s name – the livelong June –  
> To an admiring Bog!
> 
> \- Emily Dickinson

_I am surrounded by people, and not one knows who I am_ , thought Holtzmann. The thought was electric. She wasn’t her backstory, wasn’t the eccentric scientist from the news or the tabloids or the journals, wasn’t a strangely put-together puzzle to be studied and remarked upon.

She was a body, and a nebulous cloud of desires.

Holtzmann had tamed her hair a little, to be a bit less recognizable. She’d put in the effort to pull together an all black outfit in order to blend in: a pair of black velvet jodhpurs, black—well, very very dark green, technically—leather boots, an _extremely_ well-fitted dark navy brocade vest, and her favorite black leather motorcycle jacket. (No shirt, though most of her skin was hidden under the jacket.) And her dark oxblood riding gloves. Well, OK, so so it wasn’t even remotely all black. But it was all dark, anyway. That alone should make her unrecognizable, but the finishing touch was the mask, which she’d found in a thrift-store bin and kind of gone to town on. It didn’t look much like it had when she’d started.

The mask covered the top half of her face, from her hairline to her nose, with a sort of asymmetrical Borg-steampunk look. One eye was covered with a goggle eyepiece, surrounded by spikes and tiny beads of light chasing each other around, like an aggressive monocle. The other eye had been a plain almond-shape opening, but Holtzmann had installed a lens of lavender-tinted Trivex. The rest of the mask was a patchwork of riveted metal made of interesting bits from Holtzmann’s workshop floor.

She was here by herself, and wearing it, because…

Because sometimes Holtzmann ached to escape herself, to be absorbed in someone else. Usually, there was nothing she could do about it; she couldn’t tell her colleagues, so normally, she just hid in the lab, growing ever more exhausted with being herself, until the craving finally passed. It was just luck that this particular time had hit in late October, right before the big queer fetish event of the year. Good timing.

Or was it? Holtzmann was starting to second-guess herself. She hovered in a kind of awkward hallway between the vendors’ room and a play space. She hadn’t quite figured out what to do with herself, and she didn’t really fit in. There was a lot of actual black—walls, signs, balloons, and being worn by the majority of the other attendees. Even the people in neon weren’t wearing a hodgepodge like Holtzmann was. And they seemed to mostly be paired up.

She could go, or she could find whoever was running A/V on the dance floor and see if they’d let her fiddle with their gear, or she could just people-watch for a while and amuse herself by imagining Abby, Erin, and Patty as secretly being some of the other masked attendees, or…

No. There was that need: the need to not be Holtzmann for a little while.

To find someone whose intensity overpowered hers.

There were a lot of very pretty people here. Even some cool tech. Some _adventurous_ footwear choices. But nobody radiating strange energy, not enough of it, not by Holtzmann’s standards. To be fair, none of them probably ran around with unlicensed nuclear reactors on their back. She was willing to grant that her job/hobbies had possibly left her with slightly distorted ideas of what was normal and boring.

And then…Holtzmann was staring. Not making eye contact, because it was impossible. Just…staring at the whole entire shape of the woman standing a little ways away. She wasn’t moving, but somehow—even as other people passed between them—she was clearly focused on Holtzmann as well. She wore an elaborate mask composed of dark layers of lace or pierced leather, almost encrusted with metal roses, strange geometric shapes that might have been charms, dark gems with a strangely convincing luster, and filigree. Golden stag antlers, shockingly bright, emerged like tongues of flame from the temples of the mask. The mask covered her eyes entirely, or at least, Holtzmann couldn’t see them at all, giving the other woman a eerie, sacred aura.

Not something Holtzmann would have said she was into.

Until just now.

Her posture was perfect. She was tall, maybe 6-plus inches over Holtzmann’s 5’3”, and Holtzmann could tell there were muscles under that three-piece suit of luxurious sapphire-blue velvet. She had a thin silk scarf and some long necklaces wrapped around her neck and, like Holtzmann, nothing else under her vest. Despite her full lips, something about her mouth was leonine.

Even without eye contact, Holtzmann felt lightning crackling between them. She took a step toward the other woman, but stopped at an upraised hand. The woman strode toward her, and she seemed to get taller with every step. The woman reached toward her, and Holtzmann tilted her face up, although with no eyes to focus on, it was hard to know where to look.

The woman gently, but firmly, seized Holtzmann's chin. Her fingers burned with exactly the consuming fire that Holtzmann wanted, and she realized that it didn’t matter where she looked, or even if she closed her eyes.

“What’s your name?” the woman said, in a low tone. An accent—Australian, maybe, or British. It didn’t matter if it was real. It didn’t matter where she was from. She was from nowhere. With her face covered she was, like Holtzmann, a body and a collection of desires.

“I—I don’t have one,” Holtzmann said, on impulse. The woman regarded her for a moment, and something kindled in the hollow aching place deep inside Holtzmann. Her nebulous wanting coalesced like a collapsing star: dense, concentrated desire. She felt _Holtzmann_ —strangely public figure, mad scientist, pranker of co-workers, thorn in Jennifer Lynch’s side, the best in the business—starting to slip away.

The woman smiled. “All right, Nobody. You can call me Lou. I’m here to steal something in the warehouse that shares a wall with this place, but I have some time to kill. And then I saw you. So…”

Holtzmann could _hear_ the wink. Normally she would have had a million questions: Seriously? What’s in the warehouse? Why are you going to steal it? How are you going to steal it? Are you a good guy or a bad guy?

But not now.

“That won’t make a good alibi,” Holtzmann said, and it didn’t come out like a quip, just a statement suspended in the gravity between them.

“‘Not me, officer, I was with Nobody the whole time,’” Lou drawled.

She stepped even closer, entirely filling Holtzmann’s field of vision. A jeweled thumb stroked Holtzmann’s mouth. “In fact,” she said, “I’m going to make sure Nobody forgets they ever _had_ a name.”

**Author's Note:**

> I've been having a little trouble writing, so I'm attempting Kinktober in an effort to...you know, loosen up, work out some of the kinks. Hopefully this will eventually result in MORE writing of my current main series, not less, and I want to use it to stretch my writing skills.
> 
> The Day 1 prompt that I chose for this one is "masks." It's short, but I hope it was fun.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it--and aren't too mad it's not an installment of NITWIS! I'd love to hear what you think.
> 
> (Also, I need a better series title.)


End file.
